Clint Eastwood’s Blind Side

What do we learn from the Oscar nominations? For one thing, that football beats rugby. “The Blind Side” and “Invictus” each got two nominations, but it was “The Blind Side” that got one for best picture. Its other was best actress for Sandra Bullock, certainly more hard earned than Morgan Freeman’s best actor for playing Nelson Mandela in “Invictus,” directed by Clint Eastwood—because, really, how does Freeman not get nominated for that?

The two movies are about sports, but also about race and redemption—those three themes go together pretty often in the movies. And both are true stories or, as they say, based on them. “Invictus” is about how Nelson Mandela used the 1995 Rugby World Cup to bring South Africans of all races together (for that to happen, he had to get a team of underdogs, all but one of them white, to win); “The Blind Side” is about how a wealthy white family in Memphis, the Tuohys, adopted a homeless black teenager named Michael Oher, who went on to be a first-round N.F.L draft pick (2009 was his rookie season, and he helped the Ravens make it to the second round of the playoffs). Even before “The Blind Side” came out, some commentators were bothered by the racial message—on the basis of the trailers, which seemed to push the notion that a bewildered black teenager had to be “saved” from his community, and the poster, with little blond Sandra Bullock next to a very big Quinton Aron, playing Oher, as if he was her giant moppet. The Daily Beast complained about Oher being portrayed as a saintly figure who “performs miracles for white people.” (One of the “miracles” that bothered the Daily Beast, Oher blocking an air bag that might smash his adoptive brother’s face, seems to have actually happened—at least, it’s in Michael Lewis’s book, which was the basis of the movie and is, incidentally, better on the football-analysis side.) Those are reasonable complaints. The low point, in terms of racial cues, may have been when Oher’s tutor, an Ole Miss alumna, tries to frighten him out of going to Tennessee by talking about body parts buried under the Volunteers’ playing field—as if he would fall for a scary ghost story. (It’s played as a laugh line, and the tutor is supposedly a Democrat; another laugh line is that the Tuohys adopted a black son before they had an Democratic friend.)

But the movie as a whole is much better than that. Oher’s character gets some of the key lines challenging his adoptive mother, Leigh Anne Tuohy, about her motives. You also see her wondering about them herself, believably. She seems to feel less satisfied with her own goodness at the end than at the beginning. That’s why Bullock got her nomination. And part of the message, if one might call it that, of both the movie and the book, is how easily potential can be missed. Lewis notes that even Oher’s blaringly obvious physical gifts were almost overlooked, lost in the shuffle of his foster homes and neglected education, and wonders who is spotting the children from his background who might be, say, gifted scientists. At the end of the movie, Leigh Anne Tuohy talks not about how she found the chosen one, but about how another young man from the Memphis projects, a former athlete who didn’t go to college and is shot dead, could easily have been her son.

In “Invictus,” it is a white athlete who is schooled, and helped to realize his potential, by an older black man. The objection here might be that Mandela, too, is playing the saint. As I wrote in an earlier post on “Invictus” and torture, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick suggested as much when she remarked, with some impatience, that despite having seen “Invictus” and absorbed its let’s-put-the-past-behind-us message she still wanted to know what happened in the Bush years. (And well she should; the difference, though, is that the South Africans had a truth and reconciliation commission.) But “Invictus,” too, is better than that. Now that Mandela is retired from politics, we see him mostly as an elder statesman, and remember him for his twenty-seven years as a prisoner. (On that subject, the Times had a story yesterday on how Robben Island, where Mandela was held, is now being overrun by wily rabbits. They are being shot, and will be fed to cheetahs.) In “Invictus,” we see him as a politician, and a good one. We also see some fantastic rugby. The playing-field part of “Invictus” is simply superior to that in “The Blind Side,” though that may be what you get when you pit a World Cup match against a high school game.

And that, in part, answers the next question: Which is the better movie? Close Read would have given the nomination to “Invictus,” but one should consider how each did within its form. “The Blind Side” could, truly, have been awful. It could have realized the worst fears of all those who saw its posters. Instead, it surpassed expectations. (Whether it would have made it if the field hadn’t been expanded to ten is another question.) On the other side, there was Clint Eastwood and Nelson Mandela. (Bullock has never been nominated before. How many Oscars do Eastwood, Freeman, and Damon have between them?) “Invictus” was better; but it wasn’t blind-sided, either.

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